“I can do it myself (without any real estate agent) as a buyer or seller if only there were more open houses or I had open access to houses.” – This is a very common myth that is held by many buyers or sellers, when they are in process of purchasing/selling a home.

If you are going to buy a home without a real estate agent, then you might have to tackle many issues on your own. Issues that you might have to face are not limited to just ability to have access to a better MLS database, but additionally the risk of overpaying or underselling by not doing accurate comparable sales, risks associated with the complexity of transactions including complex disclosures, inspections and understanding of legalese, title reports, environmental reports and surveys and insurance and lender requirements. Any mistakes you make can be quite costly to you on likely the biggest transaction of your life and that is one of the reasons Agents job has survived the onslaught of many FSBO (for sale by owner) websites or mechanisms.

Real Estate Agent’s job is not just to do showings and open houses. Here is how real estate agents can help you to buy or sell a home and save you from significant errors:

Determining Accurate Property Value and finding an appropriate fit for buyer and bringing a property to market for a seller

Finding an appropriate fit to match your requirement, as a buyer is a job that an experienced agent would often do much better than a buyer trying that for himself/herself. For a seller, the real estate agent makes the seller aware of what condition improvements to do to bring the property to market and to expect what in return and also spends significant marketing effort on flyers, signs, internet advertising, open houses, virtual tours, cleaning and presenting. Errors here can be costly to either the buyer or seller.

Your risk is firstly in overpaying as a buyer or not getting enough as a seller, by not being to accurately value a property based on lack of access to broad and accurate MLS based comparable properties and detailed market knowledge and also how to factor in difference in comparable properties various parameters including sqft, lot size, school zone, condition of property, exact location, age, proximity to street noise and various other factors. A broker price opinion is paramount to you to value a home properly.

Negotiation to get into contract

You would find that in absence of agents, your ability to directly negotiate with a principal on the other end of the table to either get the maximum for your home as a seller or get lowest value out of a seller is highly limited. You need that middleman for the negotiation often.

Handling Complexity of Procedure to take it to closing.

Thirdly, the risk is in neglecting many complexities of a transaction including complex disclosures, title and lien reports, environmental reports and surveys, and contract legalese. Lawsuits can be costly and without thorough understanding of contract legalese, is not a risk worth taking. Agents also help close several issues that happen during the transaction for lender, insurance needs.

Agentsdeal has introduced Service Tier Based commission bidding by Agents. At Agentsdeal.com, you can mention the services you want from agents & get charged a significantly lower commission commensurate with the levels of the services desired. There are many job functions that agents do – the link to service tiers, which defines the tasks that agents do in general, for buyers and sellers can be found on Agentsdeal.com/buyers and Agentsdeal.com/sellers page – point 1. To know in general how effectively to use Agentsdeal.com to find an agent at discounted commission on the basis of services you desire,

[…] they could have got had they gone through the listing agent/buyer agent regular listing route. So “doing it yourself” and saving on commissions might not help –instead, it might actually hurt the […]